Andrew Coyne on the Harper government playbook: Frontal assault or spectacular about-face

You have to understand it was all part of the plan. After the Conservatives’ Senate reform project had rushed headlong onto the rocky promontory of the Supreme Court’s indifference, igniting a fireball of dashed hopes of … of … where was I?

The extent of Canada’s enormous good fortune is never more evident than when contemplating how much time we can afford to spend on meandering arguments over recondite issues without suffering any lingering damage.

The Meech Lake agreement, and its little sister the Charlottetown accord preoccupied whole armies of bureaucrats, scholars and political players over a period of more than half a decade, then ended one day, just like that, never to annoy us again. The national turmoil it engendered might as well never have happened for all the practical impact it had. In similar vein, many Canadians didn’t realize they were in desperate need of a written Constitution until Pierre Trudeau devoted most of his last mandate to creating one. Now that same Constitution has been cited as the reason the elected government of Canada can’t obey the will of the voters and either reform or eliminate the Senate, an institution to which people rarely paid any attention until someone suggested fixing it.

Ah yes. After the wreck of the Harper government’s Senate reform ambitions, it was patiently explained in various media that this was not the debacle it seemed. Yes, eight years of legislative effort had come to a crashing halt, and yes, the whole thing was eminently foreseeable, and yes, the government was made to look awfully foolish, but if you glanced at it sideways and squinted a little you could see this was actually the best thing for Stephen Harper, a neat way of getting him off the hook for a promise he couldn’t possibly deliver and probably wasn’t all that interested in anyway and certainly he can’t have been surprised and maybe he’s even secretly delighted and possibly this was what he intended all along.

But then, you heard much the same thing said after previous debacles. Jim Flaherty’s “maybe we shouldn’t deliver on the central plank in our 2011 platform because I’ve just discovered it’s a terrible idea” musings on income-splitting? Not a massively off-message bit of freelancing by a minister who was past caring what people in the Prime Minister’s Office thought, but a carefully orchestrated retreat from another unkeepable promise that no one bothered to mention to caucus or cabinet and that was quickly repudiated by more than one minister thus making Flaherty’s continued tenure at Finance more or less impossible.

We are so heavily invested, we media types, in the notion of Harper as master strategist, able to see around corners and think seven moves ahead and what not, that we tend not to notice how many times he has been screwing up of late. The sudden and more or less complete rewriting, on the same day as the Supreme Court decision, of the colossally misjudged Fair Elections Act, after weeks of waving off any and all criticism as self-interested or partisan or both? Merely a prudent bid to cut their losses. The unusual public goading of Barack Obama (“a no brainer … won’t take no for an answer… etc”) into making a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline project, six years after it was first proposed? Either a play to the base or a wink to the Republicans or a deliberate raising of the diplomatic stakes, anything but what it looks like: a catastrophic fumbling of a key file.

The pattern that emerges from these and other bungles — the Marc Nadon appointment, Northern Gateway — is a consistent one. Step one: Fail to gather consensus or anticipate opposition. Step two: Make no effort to disarm or co-opt critics, but antagonize them at every turn. Step three: Attempt to bluster or bully them into submission. Step four: Ignore warnings of imminent collision with reality. Step five: crash and burn.

An exception, perhaps, was the Canada Job Grant, but only after it was handed off to Jason Kenney, who appears to have set up a kind of private practice within the government. But in general this government has only two plays: the frontal assault and the spectacular about-face. That was enough, when it came to intimidating or outfoxing their hapless parliamentary opposition, where the prime minister, even in a minority Parliament, has all the advantages. But however powerful he may be within the precinct of Parliament Hill, he cannot snap his fingers to quite the same effect with regard to the Supreme Court, other governments or extra-parliamentary adversaries.

It makes no difference that in many of these cases I think the Tories have the right side of the argument. The Supreme Court’s Nadon and Senate decisions strike me as especially ill-considered, the one a violent misreading of the relevant text, the other simply ignoring it. But they were hardly unpredictable, or unpredicted. With regard to the Senate, in particular, we are left with two possibilities: either the government failed to foresee what virtually everyone was telling them was at least a strong possibility, or they knew it was coming and wasted everyone’s time for eight years.

Why they did not go to the Court first, rather than last, is a mystery, but it’s typical of this government’s tendency to place large bets on small prizes. Huge amounts of political capital have been frittered away, and for what? A superannuated maritime law specialist the prime minister took a shine to? The chance to get in a few kicks at Elections Canada? Imagine if the Tories had taken the same risks in pursuit of something real — reforming taxes or restructuring government or freeing up markets — rather than settling scores or seeking partisan advantage.

It is telling that among the prime minister’s most trenchant critics these days is Tom Flanagan, once one of his closest advisors, an academic-cum-political strategist who is at once both deeply conservative and shrewdly pragmatic. This government is neither. It is reckless, not in the style of governments that overread their mandate, but in an aimless, scattershot way. It is partisan, but for no purpose other than stubbornness and tribalism. It will take every fight to the limit, pick fights if none present themselves, with no thought to the consequences of either victory or defeat but seemingly out of sheer bloodlust. Like the proverbial dog chasing the car, it has no idea what it will do when it catches it.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.